Hoist the red flag, comrades!

Well, I was going to put up a software review in the blog this
morning, but that will have to wait for another day. As I was drinking my
morning coffee and browsing the usual spots on the Web I ran across the most
recent interview
that Bill Gates gave to the folks over at CNET News.com, and the coffee darned
near came out on my keyboard. Only the memory of how much I paid for this
particular nice keyboard kept my teeth clamped. Most of the interview was the
usual PR for Microsoft products, with the usual questionable marketing-speak and
some speculations about future technology. But then the interviewer asked Gates
to comment on people who want "to reform and restrict intellectual-property
rights" and asked whether he thought "intellectual-property laws need to be
reformed?" Here's part of his response:

No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that
believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in
the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of
communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers
and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives
should exist.
And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent
system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some
goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led
in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best
intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when
people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the
incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products
of the future.

Well, imagine that! Bill Gates calling me a communist because I'm in favor of
intellectual property reform. (Note how he shifts from people who want to reform
the IP system to those who want to abolish it in his response). And here I
thought I was being pretty reasonable when I wrote about things like the
insanity of allowing a patent for multiple scripts in one XML
file or the dubious legalese that underlies the trumpeted openness of the Office XML Reference Schemas.
But no, apparently daring to be in favor of reforming intellectual property laws
makes me a communist. To be fair, I do think software patents should be
abolished - but just to go on record about this, I'm not currently in favor of
abolishing private property in general.

And silly me, I'd really thought that somewhere in the last few decades we'd
progressed to the point where "communists" was no longer a synonym for
"bogeymen", the people who hide under the bed with the express intention of
destroying the American way of life by contaminating our precious bodily
fluids.

I also seriously question Gates' assertion that strong intellectual property
laws are behind the historical growth of the American economy in general or
computers in particular. First, it's important to recognize that the things that
reformers see as abuses (such as the ever-lenghtening time of copyright
protection or the ever-wider net of patentable ideas) are relatively recent
developments. The patent, trademark, and copyright system of today bears
relatively little resemblance to that which helped out with the McCormick reaper
or the Bell telephone (itself a dubious example, since there's pretty good
evidence that the Bell companies gamed the patent system from the very start to
get a larger monopoly than they were legally entitled to). Second, if you look
back to the rise of digital computing in the 1940s and 1950s, it wasn't driven
by private companies looking for intellectual property; it was driven by a
government that wanted to win one war and prepare for the next. An awful lot
of intellectual property came into the public domain from universities and
organizations such as the National Bureau of Standards - property on which
much of Microsoft's business is built.

I'd like to think that Gates' use of "communists" as the way to slur all
intellectual property reformers was just a slip of the tongue, perhaps caused by
his interview handlers not preparing him sufficiently for that question. But the
fact that he uses the word twice and deliberately twists the question in
his response doesn't give me a lot of hope. Perhaps Microsoft will do the right
thing and issue a retraction and an apology for this unfortunate ad hominem
attack. Either way, I can't say that I'll lose a lot of sleep over what
multi-billionaries think of me for opposing the excesses of our current legal
system.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.